The present invention relates to data networks. More particularly, the invention relates to a user-driven communication system and method, which is useful for the direct communication of a services and goods provider with an Internet surfer, an Internet surfer with other surfers or interactive television (iTV) users.
The invention enables a surfer and/or an iTV user to influence, fully or in part, the advertising space content to which he is exposed while surfing the internet and/or using iTV.
Marketing over the Internet is a very large business. Many efforts and large sums are spent on advertising to surfers and keeping contact with clients. This is done in many ways, including the posting of banners, the pushing of advertisement in the form of web pages, such as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) pages, and the redirecting of surfers to specific sites in affiliates programs, and e-mail marketing of text or HTML pages.
The Internet community has begun to realize that some of the existing advertising schemes lack efficiency for a variety of reasons, all of which are rooted in the lack of interest of the surfer toward a large majority of the advertisements shown to him. The art has tried to solve this problem in many ways. For instance, pay-for-click schemes have been implemented, which pay the surfer for viewing an advertisement. An alternative approach is to attempt to determine the surfer's interests, by presenting him with information relating to issues found in web-sites that he has visited. However, all the prior art methods have not succeeded in overcoming the problem of decreasing attention of the surfer toward advertisements.
One approach to the personalization of the advertisements directed to a specific surfer provides for the learning of the surfing habits of a surfer. Such systems follow the surfer, learn his interests by acquiring data on the web-sites visited, and deduce therefrom potential user preferences. Advertisements are then displayed selectively to the surfer, based on such deducted preferences. These methods are of low efficiency, however, since not always a site visited is visited because of a voluntary interest of the surfer, and also because the deduction of the surfer's preferences is often incorrect. The result is that there is only a slight improvement, if any, in the interest taken by the surfer in the advertisements being shown to him.
A similar method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,811, in which the surfers are required to fill-in a profile, containing personal information which is then used to decide which advertisements to display to him. This system, as other prior art systems, are all based on the assumption that it is possible in this way to improve the correlation between the advertisements sent to the user and his actual preferences. This assumption has, so far, not produced sufficiently improved results. None of the prior art methods has provided a method by which the user is the one who requests messages from specific vendors to be shown to him, which is an aim of the present invention, as opposed to the methods described above in which the system decides what and when to show to him.
Advertising methods on iTV via a cable television operator, or direct broadcast satellite TV are similar to the advertising methods that were described hereinabove in accordance to the Internet, therefore all the above drawbacks applies to iTV as well.
Many methods have been provided in the art for the communication between different surfers. In this context, communication is intended to relate to communication during surfing and/or using iTV, and not to messaging methods which are not browser related, such as e-mail. The existing methods are limited to either billboards, in which one surfer can leave messages on a web site for every surfer to see, or chats of various types, in which a surfer can communicate on-line with one or more different surfers. Chat rooms often provide privacy options, that permit two surfers to carry out a private conversation. However, the art has so far failed to provide an efficient method by means of which a surfer may communicate off-line (or on-line) with another surfer, in a private manner, via their browsers, without the need to access a chat room or similar web-site.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide individual communication methods and systems that overcome the problems of the prior art, and which allow an easy and effective communication to take place between a service or goods provider and a surfer.
It is another purpose of this invention is to provide individual communication methods and systems for permitting off-line (as well as on-line) communication between surfers, using their web browsers, without the need to employ additional systems, such as e-mail applications.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a user-driven advertisement method and system which increases the effectiveness of advertisements that reach the user. Furthermore, where an ISP or portal has the choice of showing a surfer a number of banners, it will choose those banners desired by the surfer. In this way, undesired banners will not be shown to him, or the number of those will be reduced.
It is also an object of the invention to provide a system in which the user has control over the messages shown to him, to the extent that he may decide to block access to him through his portfolio, temporarily or permanently, at any time, simply by changing parameters in his portfolio, the nature of which will be explained below.
Another object of the invention is to allow advertisers to send personal marketing messages, the cost of which depends on “the value” of each segment of consumers receiving the messages, and allowing them to pay a different amount of money for the exposure of each group of consumers to a different advertisement.
A further object of the invention, is to create a mechanism that allows commercial companies to pay for the content that each of their different “valued” customers is receiving for free from content providers.
Other purposes and advantages of this invention will appear as the description proceeds.